Patents play an important role in the industrial progress, providing information about innovations to the society and stimulating developments of further improvements. Increasing number of patent applications is being filed in Patent Offices around the world each year, exceeding 300,000 applications in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in year 2001 alone. New areas for patenting innovations become available, including software inventions, business methods related inventions and certain types of life forms. Triggered by enormous growth of the patent system, the exploitation of patents and other activities involving patents are also growing tremendously. Each year larger numbers of patents are being licensed and cross-licensed, involved in infringement and/or validity studies, used in advanced research and development programs, reached the stage of manufacturing, taken into account in mergers, acquisitions and venture capital financing. In all of the above-mentioned activities, there is an urgent need for accurate and consistent evaluation of the patents involved.
Usually, patent evaluations are based solely on opinions of experts in certain technology areas, being sometimes enhanced by second opinions provided by lawyers, accountants or other professionals. No wonder that the evaluation of the same patent may vary significantly depending on qualifications of the experts and their own evaluation criteria. In addition, experts' opinions may be biased, and since different experts may have different levels of bias, the consistency of patent evaluation may suffer to the point of rendering the evaluation project nearly useless. Clearly, such an approach is not practical for evaluating patent documents, especially when large quantities of patents are involved.
A few methods of patents evaluation have been proposed recently as will be discussed below. All of them are based on the idea of collecting suitable information about a patent under evaluation and transforming it into a monetary value of the patent. This idea is too broad to be directly applied to the patent evaluation without providing further details, which is not an easy task to do. One of the problems is that amount of information that can be collected about an average patent is large. It is not unusual to come across a patent of 200 pages long with dozens of claims. It is not immediately clear how many parameters are required to properly characterize a patent, and what those parameters are. However, the choice of parameters has a profound effect on the validity and quality of the patent evaluation. The improper choice of patent parameters may render the method of evaluation useless at best and disastrous at worst, especially if substantial amount of money is involved. Another problem is that there is no shortage of variants to transform the chosen parameters into a monetary value of a patent. Different combinations typically yield different monetary values of the patent, and it is not immediately clear which combination represents a true value or close to it. However, there is no doubt that an improper, let alone arbitrary, combination of the chosen parameters may result in disastrous consequences as far as money are concerned.
Unfortunately, most of the proposed methods of patent evaluation fail at the very beginning of the evaluation process when deciding on a set of parameters to characterize a patent. Certainly, it is not easy to choose a correct choice of evaluation parameters, however, throwing into the mix everything that we can get, apparently with little or no consideration given to the parameter's relevancy, is not likely to produce a trustworthy evaluation.
Consider, for example, a patent application WO 00/75851 to Neifeld, filed May 4, 2000 entitled “System and Method for Valuing Patents” and two papers to the same author entitled “A Macro-Economic Model Providing Patent Valuation and Patent Based Company Financial Indicators” and “Patent Valuation from practical View Point, and Some Interesting Patent Value Statistics from the PatentValuePredictor Model” cited in the Information Disclosure Statement (IDS). The main idea of these references is that a gross domestic product (GDP) is generated solely due to patents, and therefore the price of a patent can be calculated as a certain fraction of GDP. Unfortunately, while trying to apply a macro-economic model to patent evaluation and to make the evaluation completely automated without the involvement of experts, the author goes as far as offers to characterize a patent under evaluation by a number of characters in specification, a number of characters in the shortest independent claim, a number of words, lines and paragraphs, a two dimensional area each claim occupies on paper, a two dimensional area each claim occupies on electronic monitor, a number of characters in formulae and equations etc. The presumption is, as we hesitatingly understand it, that a formula containing more characters is more valuable for a patent than the formula containing fewer characters, which makes a choice of such parameters and the overall evaluation questionable.
Another example is the patent evaluation method developed by Patent Ratings, LLC, which is described in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,556,992 to Barney, issued Apr. 29, 2003, in a paper “A Study of Patent Mortality Rates: Using Statistical Survival Analysis to Rate and Value Patent Assets” to J. A. Barney published in AIPLA Quarterly Journal, Summer 2002, vol. 30, no 3, p. 317, and at the Patent Ratings website, all of these references being cited in the IDS. It discloses a computerized statistically based method of patent evaluation, in which a relative rating of a patent is generated by comparing characteristics of the patent with statistical distribution of the same characteristic within a given patent population, e.g. by comparing patent mortality rates, i.e. looking at patent metrics determined as statistically correlated to the payment of patent maintenance fees. The specific patent metrics mentioned in this method may include a number of words per claim, a number of different words per claim, word density (e.g., different-words/total-words), length of patent specification, frequency or infrequency of certain word usage. Each word and/or word phrase in a patent claim (and/or patent specification) could be assigned a point value according to its frequency of use. The total point score for a claim is taken as an indication of the relative breadth or narrowness of the claim. As in the case of the previously discussed method, there is no need to understand the meaning of the words in the claims, or in the patent specification for the patent evaluation purposes, which raises certain questions of validity of such evaluation.
The method of patent evaluation disclosed in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,665,656 to Carter issued Dec. 16, 2003 proposes to compare a target patent document with search results based on the search criteria obtained from the target document, including the step of evaluation of the target patent document according to an empirical formula, which includes a number of patent parameters. A set of more than 16 parameters is selected from the citation distribution, present date, market royalty base for the invention, patent committee corporate rank of value of patent et al, though users are encouraged to add more parameters of their choice. The set is an eclectic mixture of patent parameters, which are very different in nature and therefore should be treated differently, while in the proposed method all parameters are treated and processed substantially similarly. It looks like the author, being concerned with complete automation of patent evaluation, offers to collect whatever computer readable information is available about the patent under consideration and to process this information automatically, sometimes disregarding incompatibility between the collected data.
The U.S. Pat. No. 5,999,907 to Donner issued Dec. 7, 1999 proposes a method of patent evaluation, which is similar to the approach used in real estate, where the patent under evaluation is compared with previously sold patents having similar formal characteristics selected so that to be processed by a computer.
Another attempt to provide patent evaluations has been proposed by the Queen's University School of Business, Canada, described in the paper to Herman A. van den Berg entitled “Models of Intellectual Capital Valuation: A Comparative Evaluation”, which is cited in the IDS. The author provides a review of various accounting methods for evaluating intangible assets, with concentration on the patent citations index, wherein it is assumed that patents that are cited more often presumably have higher value.
One more method for evaluating intellectual property assets has been developed at the Shyamprasad Institute for Social Services, Hyderabad, India, which is described in the paper entitled “Analytical Method for Evaluation of IPRs” cited in the IDS. In this method the value of the intellectual property rights (IPR) is determined as a function of the value contributed by the inventor, and the value of the prior art, which in turn depends on the value of traditional knowledge and resources, and contribution of prior researchers. Though it makes it difficult to assign meaningful values to such broadly introduced characteristics, the author further suggests to classify inventions into three categories, namely “minor inventions” which add only a small incremental value to the existing body of knowledge, “normal inventions” which add moderate amount of value to the existing body of knowledge, and “path breaking inventions” which transform the society and add value in exponential fashion. As a result, the value of the invention under consideration is determined as a function of the traditional knowledge and resources (so called indivisible body of knowledge), where empirical coefficients are suggested to be used, the coefficients being different for minor, normal and path breaking inventions.
Yet another attempt to develop a meaningful scheme for evaluating and rating of patents has been made by Japanese Patent Office (JPO), see, e.g. a JPO draft “Patent Related Evaluative Indexes”, July 1999, and “Patent Evaluation Index (edition of technology transfer), March 2000, both references being cited in the IDS. The suggested evaluation scheme is based on a point score system. The patent is rated in accordance with several categories of questions, where each question in the category is given a certain number of points that are added to a total score for the category. This system is similar to a well known point score testing system widely used in education, where a student's knowledge is evaluated. Unfortunately, the point score system for patent evaluation suggested by the JPO, though at first glance being similar to the educational point score system, is not a suitable choice for evaluating patent documents due to the substantially different nature of patents and student's knowledge. For example, a point score system for testing a student's knowledge may work satisfactory, where the fact that the student does not know certain areas decreases his/her final mark only slightly. In contrast, lack of certain qualities in a patent may change its value substantially, which is not adequately reflected in the point score system. As a result, the point score system, when applied to patents, may give inaccurate and confusing results, contradicting with the common sense, with independent evaluation of patents provided by experts, and/or certain patenting criteria established at various Patent Offices.
Moreover, such contradictory results would not allow to distinguish between those patents, which still have real value, although it may be moderate or low, and those to which some residual value is assigned only due to imperfections of the evaluation system being used. As a result, the point score system cannot provide consistent data for patent evaluation, especially for evaluation of patent portfolios having large quantities of patents.
Modifications of the point score system have been used in other methods of patent evaluation. One of them has been proposed by PatentCafe.com, Inc. in the “PatentCafe®Invention and Product Evaluation System”, which is cited in the IDS, wherein the overall score over a number of parameters is calculated. Another point score method is used in the IPScore® software evaluation tool developed by the Danish Patent Office, which is cited in the IDS, and yet another point score method has been proposed in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,452,613 to Lefebvre issued Sep. 17, 2002 and applied to evaluating patent submissions.
A traditional accounting approach for evaluating monetary value of patents by applying Cost, Income and Market methods has been used by PLX Systems, Inc., which is cited in the IDS. Yet another patent evaluation method using citation index, technology cycle time and science linkage has been used by IPTEC, Inc., an intellectual property services provider in Taiwan.
Another shortcoming in the area of patent evaluation is a lack of automated and consistent analysis and interpretation of the evaluation results. Normally, the evaluation of a patent document and interpretation of the evaluation results is carried out by experts. However, it has at least four serious deficiencies that make the practical value of such interpretation questionable: the interpretation is often subjective, heavily based on expert's knowledge and experience which may differ from patent to patent and from expert to expert; it defeats the goals of keeping the level of consistency in the patent evaluation process as high as possible; it slows down the evaluation process; and it makes the evaluation process more expensive.
Another shortcoming of the currently known manual patent evaluation process is lack of meaningful and informative visual presentation of the results of patent evaluation, especially when large portfolios of patent documents have to be analyzed.
Accordingly, there is a need in the industry for the development of a method and system for systematic evaluation of patent documents, which would be more reliable, provide more consistent and meaningful results, and as a result, consequently, would be suitable for the analysis of large patent portfolios.